Dear jjcooper789:

What a read! My goodness! I read your post very attentively. It is, of course, a sad story of abuse.

Your description of your wife’s behavior is very similar to my mother’s behavior. Your insight is extensive. Like you I also came to the conclusion that what I suffered from, as a result of being with my mother, was Complex PTSD. I gained many of your own insights that you detailed throughout your post.

You asked at the end of it: when is this nightmare going to end?

Hopefully before you die. Hopefully, as soon as possible.

As I read your post I saw in my mind’s eye the image of an elephant that was chained to one place by a lock around its ankle. As a baby elephant, that was enough to prevent it from breaking free but as an adult elephant, it doesn’t. Why? Being locked, imprisoned has become what is Normal for the elephant. It adapted to the imprisonment. Breaking free would expose it to a life that seems Abnormal, unfamiliar, unpracticed.

There is a physiological mechanism in living things called homeostasis. Our bodies operates so that its temperature is the same no matter if it is summer or winter; our blood glucose is the same, or strives to be the same no matter what we eat. In a similar way, our brains strive for sameness, mental-homeostasis (my term). So when you have been imprisoned for so long in your marriage, your brain adjusted and it became normal.

If it didn’t become normal for you, it would have been way more distressing than it has been. Can you imagine? Not much different from a prisoner getting institutionalized: if not, the imprisonment would be unbearably distressing. So the prisoner makes the best of the circumstances: gets lots of pleasure from eating or making alcohol from fruits served at lunch… from playing chess with other prisoners and so forth. And when released from prison many experience so much distress that they commit a crime just so to go back to prison.

When will this nightmare end? It will take courage on your part; courage to break through the distress of exiting the Normal to the Abnormal, the fear of leaving the sameness. Help from another person may be necessary for you. In the US there are shelters for abused spouses, designed to help the spouse in this transition from the normal to the abnormal.

Would like to communicate further with you and hope you will post again.

anita